Monday Night Football Recap: The Stuff I Believe

I am one of those fans who looks at the NFL schedule as soon as it comes out and checks the Monday night games to see how many times my team — The Redskins — will be playing. It's a holdover from the days when Monday Night Football was a network entertainment investment, a real event. I guess I still live under the illusion that game selection for Monday night means something, like it's some vote of competitive confidence from the cognoscenti in the commissioner's office. This year, I actually thought that it was respectable that the Redskins got one game on Monday, since no one expected much. The tools at Sports illustrated projected them to win two games. With a rookie quarterback, no running-game to speak of (long live Tim Hightower), and a father-son coaching duo who had proven nothing to date, it might not have been a bad call. Except that it was a terrible call, so suck it, SI.

Of course, the Redskins won that Monday night game a couple of weeks ago, a game I watched in a bar in West Hollywood after interviewing an actor for a profile at his house and begging him to Tivo the game's first fifteen minutes. He would not, though really, what good would that have done me? There was a whole game to watch. In the end, I saw the bulk of it. In fact I watched so closely that I could not find my car afterwards, me having had nothing to drink except Saratoga water.

Club soda is the only thing I like to drink when watching the Skins; I mean, if I can't get cream ale, which is really the only thing. That's because I grew up in Rochester and my father never cared if I stole his Genesee Cream Ales on a Sunday. It doesn't make them win. It's not a good luck charm or anything, and I often go without. It's just something I've done since I was a kid. And the Redskins never won back then. This was when Jack Pardee strolled the sidelines, the darks days of the late '70s. I just liked two cream ales, and I never spent them while watching any other team. Back then I was so tight. I liked my dinner served right after the game, since that let my parents watch 60 Minutes, which I tolerated during the meal mostly because nobody talked. I've never wanted to speak after witnessing a Redskins loss. I simply drank my two cream ales and asked my family to leave me alone.

In those days, I got to see the Redskins four to five times a year: twice when they played the Giants, once or twice when they played the Cowboys, and whenever they were slated on Monday night. Now I have Sunday ticket and watch every Redskins game. I am still dumbstruck for hours after a loss. I still drink the cream ale (though I drink Sunlight Cream Ale now, brewed in Indianapolis, available in bright yellow pint cans). It is my very own Kool-Aid of stupidity. After their recent MNF victory over the Giants, I could not make myself write about it, so fearful was I of jinxing them. I made my excuses to the editors. I was traveling. And who am I fooling — no one reads these things anyway? Why would I mess around with the outcome of the one game I really believed in? So, first thing, I wanted to apologize for not writing up week 12. In recent years, I've come to think football is really a lot more fun when you don't give a good goddamn.

Take last night! The New York Jets lost to the Titans, ending their playoff chances, replete with Mr. DeMille granting Rex Ryan his final close-up in green; so in truth, I should touch on the reason why I'm not speaking about that game, perhaps the worst-played contest of the MNF slate this year, in which Mark Sanchez appeared as a stressed-out Lindsay Lohan impersonator — dark circles beneath once-soulful eyes, the same overly skinny legs, even a signature slug of the mustachioed sadness of the sometimes unkempt starlet. I should probably point out that the other quarterback for the Jets, an obscure guy named Tim Tebow, made two appearances in last night's game — for a single stilted drive, in the first quarter, and one other time for a given play after Sanchez had thrown two pretty good passes in a row. Such is the heart of the trademark veering and hitching that typically defines the Rex Ryan WTF offense: a swift veering from what works, punctuated by plenty of hitching — of Rex Ryan's pants.

All season long, I've been questioning whether it's better to anticipate a great game on Monday based on the wisdom of the schedulers, the mayhem of the season, or to just watch every game they bring you insistently, from gate-to-gate, because, well, there must be a saying — leave it all on the field, you never know, a chip and a chair, life is a box of chocolates, God is in the details, or — everybody's favorite — Tebow! Tebow! Tebow!

Here, then, is my week-15 conclusion: If you watch every game, if you see enough fans painting themselves the many shades of the NFL palette, squeezing themselves into cardboard robot costumes, throwing boos up into the air as if they were actually more weighty than the empty cries of crows, you start to realize that it's better to care. To believe. And watching every game, even when all these games do is measure the demise of a team that negated itself over the course of the season (as the Jets have, and the Titans, too) or on the occasions when they mark the progress of of a team binding together, like — say — the Broncos, it guarantees nothing except the revelations and uncertainties of belief.

Here are mine: Last night, as I stood up to turn off my television after a low snap to Sanchez at the Jets' 15-yard-line became a kicked ball, then a loose ball, then a lost fumble, the Jets fell to pieces once and for all. I'd watched them toil to the bitter end once more. I looked down at my left hand and realized that I had watched the game while drinking a fucking cream ale. My last one, too. I'd spent my cream ale on the Jets, this while the Redskins are, or were, in the playoff hunt. I stormed out and threw the can in my yard. I walked my dog. What a screwup. What a complete jinx. Like I told my dog while we both pissed in my yard: Now I gotta drive an hour to Indianaplis to get more cream Ale, and hope I can reverse things for the Skins when they play the Eagles this Sunday. Hope! And on Christmas week, too. "I'm an idiot!" I told the dog. An idiot.

Here's the saying I was looking for earlier, the one they use all the time now. I think it comes from Obama or Tom Brokaw or somebody. Here it is: "This (is the stuff) I believe."

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